UW Startup Spectrom Tries to Bring Color to Desktop 3D Printing

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If you believe industry insiders—and a considerable amount of media hype—desktop 3D printers are about to become the proverbial next big thing, as companies like MakerBot, 3D Systems, and Solidoodle find ways to create more reliable, user-friendly printers that consumers and most professional designers can afford.

But while those companies duke it out for market share and a place in workshops, garages, and studios around the world, a Madison, WI-based startup is trying to solve another problem: how to get 3D printers to print in full color at a price point accessible to the mass market.

Spectrom was founded last year by a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison students and recent graduates. The startup has developed an adapter that allows desktop 3D printers to put down layers of colored plastic when they print a design using a process called fused deposition modeling. Spectrom’s device can add dye to the melting plastic that changes its colors when the software that runs the printer tells it to do so. The technology has drawn early interest among industry enthusiasts because commercially available desktop 3D printers typically only churn out single-color objects.

There are other attempts to bring color to the consumer 3D printing market, but they rely on multiple heads and spools of plastic. Spectrom uses a single head that can be added to 3D printers already on the market. The company believes its product could sell for less than $100.

Color is a big step forward because it could lead to better, more useful products, Spectrom co-founder Cedric Kovacs-Johnson said. He gave the example of a radiologist being able to better highlight tumors along a 3D model of a bone to help patients and doctors visualize the problem.

“Just being able to do that with two colors is way more effective,” he said.

Spectrom still is in its infancy, but Kovacs-Johnson thinks it can take advantage of where the industry is headed.

He notes that 3D printing is a relatively mature technology, having been around for about 30 years. But for most of those years, printers were large and expensive enough that they were out of the price range of all but the biggest companies and labs. The big breakthrough came around 2009, when companies like MakerBot began making printers that were smaller and affordable. Prices now range from about $600 for starter models like the Solidoodle Press to just less than $5,000 for a more advanced model like the 3D Systems ProJet.

Those companies helped prove a market existed, and their printers are used by professionals who need to design models, prototypes, or even replacement parts.

At the same time, hobbyists with money to spend and the patience and know-how to work with machines that still aren’t quite user friendly took to the printers. And this past summer, The Home Depot announced it would install MakerBot printers in a small number of stores.

“Engineers and designers now have access to this technology, and it’s really been democratized,” Kovacs-Johnson said. “This is going to be the future of 3D printing, this accessible desktop market.”

“We have the right idea now at the right time, and the market is really exploding,” he added. “If we can jump with the color technology we’ve developed into the space that’s just exploding right now, I think we can really be successful.”

Spectrom’s origin story is a version of the classic college startup story. Kovacs-Johnson and his co-founders came up with the idea while using desktop 3D printers for class projects. They thought about ways to improve the devices and then went to work.

The success convinced the three members of Spectrom’s five-member team who graduated in August to turn down job offers, Kovacs-Johnson said. The other two members remain in school.

The team combines students with backgrounds in chemical, mechanical, and software engineering, which Kovacs-Johnson said speaks to the complexity of making hardware able to manipulate plastics and dyes and the software needed to control it.

“3D printing is one of the rare places where you see the combination of such diverse technical needs,” he said.

Right now, Spectrom is focused on two things. There’s the technical challenge of finishing its first model that’s ready for beta testing. Spectrom currently is … Next Page »